


Correspondence Course

by gogollescent



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 15:17:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garak gives Bashir a massage. Set sometime in the first half of season 7: I would ambitiously categorize this as "pre-slash" if I thought it was going anywhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Correspondence Course

It was closing on 0300 when Bashir escaped the infirmary, moving at a controlled stagger into the turbolift across the hall. He almost tripped over Garak’s feet on entry, and Garak caught his arm with absent-minded delicacy, only letting go when Bashir made eye contact. He glanced away. “Good evening, doctor,” he said to the wall.

“Morning,” said Bashir.

Garak’s expression in profile bespoke the kind of embarrassed irritation that Bashir remembered from med school, when his pedantry had sometimes alienated entire tour groups of visiting undergrads at a time. Some amusement must have shown on his face, because Garak quickly schooled his features into their normal attack formation of polite detachment.

“I admit, I’m surprised to see you up and about this—early.”

“We’ve been pulling double shifts since the fleet returned from the Porias system,” said Bashir. “Down in Medical. Where are you coming from?”

“The constable wanted to pass along a packet of transmissions,” said Garak. “Not quite as urgent a matter as the lives of Martok’s brave soldiers, but I find that in the present climate I need very little sleep.”

Bashir thought there was probably a barb there—certainly a jab at the Klingons—but he wasn’t sure that it was anything more than habitual abrasiveness; Garak sometimes asked people to pass the salt ironically. Also, he was too tired to object, especially when the last of the squadron he’d been working on had gone for his neck immediately after coming out of his coma. “I wish I could say the same. Sometimes it feels like my alarm’s gone off before I can so much as close my eyes.”

Garak was looking at him strangely. “What?”

“It’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so… tense.”

Bashir turned that one over in his head. “You mean, even though we’ve been prisoners in the same Dominion camp, and trapped in the same collapsing holosuite program, and—”

Garak lifted a hand. “Your body language, my dear doctor, tends towards the fluid, even in circumstances that would seem to demand a little rigidity. I’ve always assumed it had something to do with your genetic enhancement—”

“Oh,  _please_  don’t start on that again—”

“—but tonight I could bounce a credit chip off the back of your neck.”

“Is this leading up to something?” said Bashir.

Garak shrugged. “I would hate to cut into your already shortened respite,” he said. “I was, however, going to offer you a massage. Tension knots do no one’s professionalism any favors.”

Bashir for a moment was sure that he’d misheard him. Then he didn’t know what to think. It seemed like a generous offer. Garak could be ostentatiously winning, or in a pinch effortlessly cruel, but when he was running on automatic he defaulted to kindness, not out of feeling but a sort of ground-down sensitivity—the kind of thing that made one prop up stumbling chief medical officers and then let go as though burned. Having met Tain, Bashir could guess why, but now Garak was speaking with all his old overblown charm while standing in that poised, deferential way that Bashir associated, paradoxically, with Garak-at-ease: Garak’s lowest alertness level, when training bubbled up. He said, “You do massages?”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“When did you stop the turbolift?” said Bashir. The last twelve hours had taken their toll on his powers of observation, but they weren’t moving.

Garak looked almost guilty. He pulled the lever. “It’s been some time since I had the pleasure of your conversation,” he said. “I assumed when you didn’t object…”

And why shouldn’t he have assumed? It wasn’t his fault that Bashir was nodding off at thirty second intervals, even if he probably wouldn’t have scrupled to take advantage of it. Bashir sighed. “I’m less than sentient at the moment,” he said, waving off the non-apology. “Where did you pick up masseusing? Let me guess, you used to lure enemy agents into the spa and then pound their backs until they gave up the goods?”

“I took a six-week correspondence course,” said Garak. He met Bashir’s incredulous eyes. “It was a gift.”

Before Bashir could reply to  _that_ plausible assertion, the doors pinged open. Bashir stepped out, then turned and frowned into the bright light of the turbolift, where Garak was waiting patiently, illuminated to the fullest extent by the overhead fixtures. He was wearing his saffron-yellow tunic and he faintly resembled a daisy, although no daisy in the history of the world had probably ever worn his air of unassuming trustworthiness. It was tempting to accede. He could picture it now: himself flat on his stomach in his quarters, slipping off within minutes, and Garak offended by the human nerve of it all, to doze while vulnerable and in the presence of an enemy. Surely if their relationship as it stood had one advantage over the friendship that had been, it was that they could be bored with one another—a genuine luxury, if like Bashir one remembered how it had felt to be continually on edge, anticipating the shape of a knife inside the tailored sleeve.

“All right,” he said. “Thank you. We’ll just go to mine.”

“Naturally,” said Garak. “I may be asking for a little of your time, doctor, but even I couldn’t be so heartless as to keep you from your bed. You are so obviously pining for it,” he added, as Bashir gave another little lurch.

“Ha, ha, ha,” said Bashir, but he led the way.

Once inside his quarters Garak went to the replicator and fussed with the settings like Kira did before ordering a raktajino. They were all getting fastidious in their old age, humor creeping into their unselfconscious routines as they surrendered to the necessity of caring for small comforts. He used to wonder how they could act so amused—Jadzia and Sisko and the rest, responding to crisis after crisis with cool frivolity; he’d thought the frontier was wasted on them, a little. He’d been such an ass, and now he was the one who found himself snickering at inappropriate moments, in staff meetings, at dinner with Ezri. All right, the sleep debt was part of it, but sometimes it seemed fitting to him that—having been oblivious to so much for so long, while the others were living and dying and protecting him—he should get the last laugh.

Garak came back with a little bottle of oil. Bashir looked at it, and then transferred his gaze to his bed. “Should I put out a towel?”

Garak seemed affronted. “I won’t use it that liberally,” he said. “All I require is that you take off your shirt.”

Bashir obeyed him wordlessly. Part of him felt a little thrill of vestigial fear at the exposure, like the ghost of a Julian Bashir four years gone, and when the shirt was off he lay down and folded his arms beneath his chin in a poor attempt at topless-casual. Garak settled down on the edge of the bunk, nudging up against the side of Bashir's waist with one hip, and poured out a gout of oil.

It didn’t feel as strange as he’d braced himself for it to. Garak’s hands were rough, but not off the spectrum of human palms, although a human would have had to do hard labor for years to achieve that scraping sharpness of edged skin. That was Cardassians for you: a species-wide callus. But mediated by the oil they were heavy and cool on his back, and the texture became more enjoyable as Garak lifted his hands periodically to rub in extract. He had broad, square fingers, almost childlike except for their strength, and Bashir thought with unexpected affection that he certainly wasn’t using more than a fraction of that.

He didn’t drift. That was unexpected, too, but the massage wasn’t really restful for its type—lots of squeezing and gouging, and an impression of depths accessed in his back that he hadn’t known were there. Garak was about as good as you’d expect after a six week correspondence course, but that could have been a front, or maybe the Tal Shiar didn’t know a skilled masseuese from an amateur. Maybe he’d been telling the truth. “Do Cardassians  _do_ this?” said Bashir. “Massage?”

Garak paused. Bashir valiantly tried not to melt. There was the relaxing part of massage: it eventually stopped. All the interconnected twine and sinew of his back had suddenly gone slack, released like the rope in a bell tower, and miraculous silence filling his ears when the bell was stopped. “Not as such,” said Garak, stroking his thumb abstractedly across the sawtooth line of Bashir’s vertebrae, a bump-bump-bump like descending stairs on one’s bottom. “That is, we don’t do this kind of manipulation—our hides are too thick, and in general it’s felt that if you’re tense, you probably should be.”

“You don’t agree?” said Bashir. “There is a war on.”

“But while a soldier’s stresses might improve his reflexes and and hone his vigilance, yours can only hinder your performance,” said Garak. He’d started to knead again. Bashir felt like a loaf, albeit a grateful one. “On the other hand,” said Garak, flattening his, “when I was a small boy I used to see Tain’s housekeeper helping him with his shoulders during his sheds. Mila could be quite brutal with a backscratcher.”

It was easy to feel rich now that he no longer went begging for scraps. The aimless confessionalism, formerly unthinkable, haunted their rare meetings—not only theirs, but all Garak’s dealings, as though having been forced open the once he’d never quite sealed the leak. Bashir thought he had probably been telling the truth when he’d said—Odo had said he’d said—that he’d never committed treason at all, or never understood himself to be a traitor, because otherwise this little business of transmissions and codes would never have had such an effect on him: to pull his seams apart. Undo all darns. Or it had been something else—letting Bashir sit in the room where his father lay dying, say, and regretting it after. Garak had sought him out once because he’d needed a foothold on the station aside from Quark’s fashion sense; Bashir understood that, and when Garak had become elusive in the wake of his solidifying ties with Starfleet as a body, rather than as represented by one doctor, Bashir had accepted the action of estrangement with some relief. He’d contributed, probably. It was all very reasonable and adult, symptomatic of whatever maturity he’d accumulated with the onset of the war, but still he thought that it was wonderful, that he could lie here in the low gold spill of bedside lamplight and listen to Elim Garak discuss his childhood like weather.

Not that Garak was still talking. “I am a soldier,” Bashir observed, into the quiet. Garak made no reply, but after another moment’s determined knot-loosening he withdrew his hands and screwed the cap back onto the bottle, visible as a slate blur at the corner of Bashir’s eye.

Bashir flipped himself over, careless now of the still-wet surface of his back, and looked up at his old friend. Garak hadn’t even scoffed. He was merely, barely, smiling, and that thoughtfully, his nose flattened by the stretch of his mouth and his eyes shadowed in the pits of their ridges. Without thinking Bashir reached up to touch his dry face, and only stopped at Garak's startled retreat—his idle hand still hovering, in the long space between.


End file.
